Essay Sample on Tampax Advertising

Tampax's long history as a tampon and sanitary pad brand among the various international brands is well-known for "empowering women and those who bleed to live a life without constraints," (Tampax n.d.) with their main method highlighting a woman's femininity by "focusing on the brand's fun and lighthearted nature'" and "avoiding advertising clichés by allowing women to admit that they don't always welcome their periods" (Golding 2009). Indeed, this femininity type, known as “power femininity” (Lazar 2006) has been seen in recent menstrual advertisements, where women are portrayed as "unstoppable and engaging in all activities during their periods" while covertly defining what it means to be a woman (Del-Saz Rubio and Pennock-Speck 2009). This also applies to Tampax advertisements, where women are seen diving, shopping, and even going on vacation all while being unapologetically feminine. Despite this approach, the discourses surrounding femininity in Tampax’s advertising reinforce the traditional taboo of not mentioning menstruation by showing how women ‘take control’ of their lives and relationships without menstruation worry through choice words that act as a substitution for menstruation as well as carefully selected images of women that play a part in this ostensible “empowerment”. Subsequently, this essay will then analyse both the visual and verbal aspects of recent Tampax advertisements to investigate how power feminine discourses are thus embedded and reproduced in their menstrual advertising. Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) will then be applied to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the multimodal semiotic resources exploited in the discursive representation of power femininity in Tampax’s menstrual advertising? and 2) What gendered discourses do these semiotic resources communicate?

As my approach outline, the essay will utilize Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021) framework on the grammar of visual design and Jeffries’ (2007) framework on the textual constructions of the female body. These two frameworks could then gain some insights into female advertising, or “femvertising” (Lazar 2006) in a post-feminist age and how menstrual companies like Tampax utilize certain discourses in an overall power feminine representation in their advertising and the semiotic resources that are used to convey this meaning.